II. MON. 13 Mar. 1989
24 hour flow. Nothing for it but to go to office and work. At 2:30 finally decided to go to Van Zant Bend and see Jimmy Gray. Met him on the road near his uncle's house. We talked for nearly three hours on the road and then in the old cemetery that looks out over the bend. He told me of fishing the river in the days before the dam. The fish were redhorse, sucker, carp, perch, bass, and blue cats....
After talking of fish--including his nearly drowning when a trot line hook snagged his leather jacket and a big cat was pulling the line down in heavy water--we spent a hour in the old cemetery making out the 75-100 year old stones, many now traces read only by angling at the shadows of names in the falling light. He showed me his parents graves, his and Emma's plots next to them, and he pointed out from the hill the house--among the 5 or 6 in the bend--where he was born. His whole life has been measured by the arc, the bend, of the river. While we talked a car with Michigan plates on it went down the road. We both shuddered at the thought of development--I recalling the endless houses now along the Rappahannock and Rapidan Rivers in Virginia; he, strangers who wouldn't wave. How the hell did those Yankees find Van Zant Bend?
We talked until the sun set across the river behind the ridge that is one side of Bean Hollow. It wasn't much trout fishing today, but river people are part of the life of the river as much as the fish in the river. And as Jimmy said, "What are we here for if it ain't to have a little fellowship?" As I turned to go, he said, "Come here anytime. Make your self at home in the bend." It isn't the fish. It's the river: the water, the flow, the land, the people. And the fellowship. What else are we here for?
Sometimes when I go back in these bends and hollows or look out over the fields and ridges where one sees an occasional barn and less occasional house, I feel as if I were out of now time and am walking awake in the past. It is a past here that makes one piece with my childhood and the texture of land and life on the old peninsula between the Rappahannock and Potomac Rivers. The Elk and its tributary streams are like the upper Rappahannock near the confluence of the Rapidan. Rolling land, cleared hills used mostly for grazing, narrow wedges of trees up the bottoms shading small streams. Thin wandering lines of trees bending with old fence lines along the ridge tops.
The contrast between the river bends and the area around Broadview is sudden, sharp. Already Broadview is the other world, the now world; Winchester a bustling city with all the ten thousand things to see and have and do and not the one thing to be. But at Harmony the road drops from the flat farm land and winds into the bends and bottoms, putting that world behind faster than the road descends. I shed more than time, more than miles, by going to the river bends. Past arises and unfolds and what I remember is what I see. It is, in a way that is disquieting and engaging, more than I remember: clearer to my eye. Past projected forward, before me, childhood anticipating me as I grow older. Vision laden with memory coming to pass. Not having to call it forward or remember it. And so little of now.
Saturday the gravel road up Bean Hollow from Wakefield Bend several times gave me cause to stop and figure if it had not become just a driveway that went no further. The last house before the road climbs out to the ridge is set on a small curve so close the road seems to end there for it is not visible beyond the porch. The house is on a low mound, shaded by old trees and the hollow is not more than 75 yards wide. It did not surprise me that this last, or first, house was a log cabin. It had near perfect double-taper notches to lock the logs in place so that very little caulking had been needed to make it snug. If I had been set down here from another planet I don't think I could have told the century I was in. Cabin, trees, porch, dog, dirt road, Bean Hollow. Today or yesterday were the same. So little evidence of the passage of time. Of the turning of the seasons, yes. But the seasons turn round again and again and before and after do not mean distance, loss, regret.
Almost, I can hear the voices. Buck, Hattie, Gladys, Richard, Tom, Bernice, John. Sullivans, Withers, Greens, Truslows. Calling the hogs, sing hollering across the fields. The creaking of wagons, gates, well pulleys. The nasal blowing of mules. The rustling rattle of corn shucks. Smell of chicken, hog, dust, mud. The always surprising lightness of dried cobs after the shucking. Harness straps oil-black, dusted green with rising mould. And not a car to raise the dust. Only a distant whir, too far yet to mind out at the highway. And in Bean Hollow I could almost call out, "Hey, Uncle John," and almost hear him. Or else hear nothing but the wind brushing the boxelders. But the wind and the voices are whispers, and the other river keeps sliding past all my memories, and the hands of the clock go round and round but they don't come back again. Time is a river without a bend.